Mitt Romney On Women At Bain: They Don't Want To Work There

But Tuesday night wasn't the first time the Republican presidential candidate has gotten into trouble trying to explain how difficult it is for him to find "qualified" women for senior positions.

In 1994, when Romney challenged the late Sen. Edward Kennedy in Massachusetts, the Boston Globe first raised the question of why there were so few women and minorities employed at Bain Capital Partners, the Boston-based private equity group Romney founded. At the time, all 95 vice presidents of the firm were white, and only nine were women.

Romney's answer at the time was similar to the one he gave Tuesday night, that there simply weren't any female applicants. He blamed the profession, private equity, and said it didn't "attract many women and minorities." He also blamed the elite business schools, from which Bain recruited almost exclusively. Those schools, he told the Globe, "graduate only a handful of minorities and women."

Statistics suggest otherwise. In 1995, a year after Romney made his comment, the Harvard Business School graduating class was almost 30 percent women. And given the enormous potential of private equity to generate wealth, it's difficult to imagine that women and minorities simply wouldn't be "attracted" to the profession.


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/17/mitt-romney-women-bain_n_1974837.html